confession

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me (2 Corinthians 12:9).

~the apostle Paul, self-proclaimed “the worst of sinners” in his first letter to Timothy

I really hate it when I pull up at school in the afternoon and one of my children is crying.  My heart sinks into my stomach and I want to cry too, before I even know the reason for their tears. I want to scoop them up and shelter them with my arms.  So, when the Psalmist cries out to God over and over again, “hide me in the shadow of your wings,” I get it, and I know that the longing echoes God’s own desire to protect us from pain.

On Tuesday, as I drove up, Zoe walked toward me with purpose, tears flooding her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, already opening my door and pushing back the seat so that she could climb up on my lap.

“I got on blue today,” she said, with the last effort she had to control her emotions.

At our school, colors represent behavior—in her class, it’s purple for “superstar (which means above and beyond what’s expected),” green for good behavior all day, blue for a warning, and so on.  Zoe has only been on blue one other time since she started school, and that time her whole kindergarten class  had been instructed to “move their clips” so that the teacher could make a point.  That day she also cried.

“Why did you get on blue?” I asked carefully, trying hard to wipe my face of emotions or conclusions.  Sometimes it stinks to be so expressive, especially when my daughter is so keenly perceptive.

“Well,” she said, trying to catch her breath.  “We were at lunch in the cafeteria, and one of the boys was sweeping the floor, and he kept putting the end of the broom on our chests.”  She mentioned several of her friends by name, patting her chest in the center of the breast bone for emphasis. “So, I just took the end of the broom and pushed it away, but he yanked the broom, and my teacher saw us and thought we were having a tug of war, so she said I had to move my card.  But I wasn’t having a tug of war, I was just trying to get him to stop doing that so he wouldn’t hurt my friends.”

“Did you tell your teacher that?”

“Yes, but she said that someone could’ve gotten hurt.”

“Well, she’s right,” I said, stroking her hair and smiling.  “The next time something like this happens, you need to ask the other student nicely to stop.  If he won’t, you need to go find an adult to help you.  Pushing the broom away was probably not the best choice.  But honey, everyone makes mistakes.  It’s going to be okay.”

I couldn’t help but smile to myself, knowing that Zoe would likely never forget this one little “blip” on her behavioral record.  We are so much alike that sometimes it’s scary.  As I sat listening to her story, the kindergarten countenance of my friend Mikey flashed into memory.  Mikey was the reason for my one and only frowny face in elementary school.  Mikey cost me a trip to the treasure box.

He was one of those kids that just took a little longer than the rest of us to catch on to things, and being me, I thought I might be able to help him a bit.  When Mikey fell behind on identifying his colors, I took a giant box of multi-colored paper clips with me to school and quizzed him during our free time, my back pressed against the pastel-painted cinder-block wall in our kindergarten classroom. So, when Mikey broke his collar bone, I became his self-appointed classroom assistant.

At recess, when he cried about not being able to climb the monkey bars, it never occurred to me to ask an adult for help, or even permission.  Why is it that taking matters into our own hands is second nature, even in childhood?  So young, and already too busy trying to prove ourselves amazing to admit that we need help.  That muggy afternoon, I just wrapped my arms around Mickey’s waist and tried to lift him up, arm sling and all, urging him to reach up and grab those bars, broken bone or no.  I did not understand what all the commotion was about as our teacher came running across the playground, her wavy black and gray hair flying into her face, her tone urgent and angry.

“No ma’am,” she said to me sternly.  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

Then she turned her attention to Mikey, who clearly was o-kay, and started cooing at him, asking him if anything hurt.

That day, I went home with a big frown stamped on my behavior calendar.  I didn’t understand, and it hurt.  And even though it wasn’t Mikey’s fault, I quit trying to help him. Regular people trying to be superheroes fall hard.

A good friend told me that while they awaited my arrival, Zoe had been especially concerned about how I would receive the news when she told me about being “on blue.”  Despite my friend’s reassurance, Zoe couldn’t find freedom from that anxiety while she waited for me.  I wondered about that, sitting there talking to my friend, trying to remember a time when Zoe had made an unintentional mistake and I had not handled her gently.  Why should she ever be afraid to tell me about her failures?  But confessions are just hard, no matter who’s receiving them.

James, the brother of Christ and a leader in the early church, wrote, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed (James 5:16).”  But our tears are swallowed or hidden, and if we’re honest, we often still gloss the facts, like children hoping to soften the vulnerable truth with a bit of sheen. See the persona, because I’m afraid for you to know the real me.

Wednesday night on American Idol, Beyonce told Lauren Alaina that she creates a persona for herself because she’s really very nervous.  She made this gesture with her body, pulling her shoulders in protectively, then she went on to explain that before every show, she psychs herself up and gets “into character.”  The first thing I thought was this: It takes a tremendous amount of confidence to admit to having a “diva persona,” and still more to admit that the real person underneath is actually very different.  And then I thought:  The reason Lauren is still in the top three is not just that she has an amazing voice, and it’s not just that Steven Tyler has loved her from the beginning.  Her transparency in all those confessions of insecurity makes it easy for millions to live vicariously through her.  It’s the American dream—an ordinary, spunky, colorful, insecure teen with an undiscovered gift becomes a superstar.  The funny thing is, everyone has a persona, but not everyone has the guts to admit to the reality underneath it.  Beyonce’s advice to Lauren really boils down to creating and believing in a new persona, because ten to one Lauren already has one. Reliable personality inventories always involve a three-part assessment: the way someone close to you sees you, the way you see yourself, and the way you believe you are seen by everyone else.

All this made me smile, because growing as a writer always means learning to be transparent.  Writing teachers call it finding your voice.  When I was in high school, my favorite English teacher used to say that, smiling at me as she handed back my creative submissions.  “Keep working, you just have to find your voice.  When you do, you’ll know it.” I just love those bits of advice, the ones you only really understand in retrospect.  What she meant was that one day, I’d lose myself in my writing and all the walls would fall down, and what’s left on the paper would just be me confessing who I really am, throwing off the persona. Let’s face it: we protect ourselves with our personae, even though what we all really want is for someone else to be real with us.   But confessions are naked and vulnerable, and we’re all a bit afraid someone will see who we really are and snicker at our weaknesses, or worse, that they’ll say nothing at all.  Zoe feared that I would be unforgiving and harsh.

How do I teach my children the freedom of confession, the beauty of honestly owning their weaknesses?  The key, it seems, is to confess my own mistakes, honestly seeking not attention for myself, but glory for the God who redeemed and uses even me, with all my failures.  How like God, that drawing honor and attention to His love and transforming power is born of dying to our selves and every hope that we will be esteemed.  Smoke and mirrors—it’s all just an illusion we spend a lifetime trying to perfect, a magic trick that we work hard to keep secret.  Freedom is always found in the truth.

And even as I pray that God will give me the ability to handle the confessions of my children (and others) well—-with love and support, sometimes with tears, but without excuse, recognizing the reality of consequences—I realize that I have to teach them one important truth:  The Lord, too, was mocked, his true identity spat upon in favor of every persona falsely gripped for power. If our confessions bring the thing we fear the most, we are only walking in His footsteps.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in^[a] Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. ¹⁰ I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. ~Philippians 3